Raj Nair, president of Ford Motor Co. in North America, has left the automaker after complaints of "inappropriate behavior," Ford said Wednesday.

Ford, in a statement, said an internal investigation found that "certain behavior by Nair was inconsistent with the company's code of conduct." It did not divulge the nature of Nair's behavior.

CEO Jim Hackett said Ford "made this decision after a thorough review and careful consideration. Ford is deeply committed to providing and nurturing a safe and respectful culture and we expect our leaders to fully uphold these values."

Geoff Edwards, co-creator of peace coalition Saturday Morning and formerly CAA Marketing co-head of creating, has joined R/GA as VP and executive creative director of Los Angeles to help it expand further into entertainment.

Edwards officially joined R/GA last week and succeeds Kalle Henzen, who left the agency in July last year. During Edwards' time at CAA, he led accounts for Anheuser Busch InBev, Blizzard, Keurig, 4-H and Casa, and he played an integral role in cultural work, such as the award-winning short documentary "American Dreams" about Jimmy John's.

"R/GA is a brand that I've coveted for some time," Edwards tells Ad Age. "I've admired how they tell modern stories that are both actionable and tangible, and they have been able to disrupt themselves since the '70s and change with a changing environment."

Google on Wednesday offered web publishers an optional update to its AdSense system that it says uses machine learning to choose the best ads to display and the best places to put themeven areas where there were no ads before.

"Place one piece of code just once to all of your pages and let Google take care of the rest," the company says in a blog post pitching the update, called Auto ads.

Publishers will not need to remove their existing, manually-placed ads to use it; Auto ads won't interfere with those, Google says.

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than seven million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.

A few highlights: Silversea, the cruise line, encourages you to experience "the authentic beauty of the world." Macy's hypes its Presidents Day Sale event, with discounted mattresses, furniture and rugs, continuing through the week. And Old Navy wants you to "#SayHi" to its new denim fashions in a music-video-esque spot starring a bunch of attractive models who don't speak (or sing) a word but dance up a storm.

It's taken months, but McDonald's is ready to serve more Szechuan sauce to Rick & Morty fans and everyone else. The sauce's anticipated winter return was announced with teasers for a three-episode podcast, "The Sauce," coming Feb. 22 from Studio@Gizmodo, Onion Labs and McDonald's.

The media doesn't have a lot of speeds when it comes to covering the passing of cultural icons. The typical default mode, at least immediately after death, is stiffly hagiographical; many obituaries are mostly pre-written, sometimes years in advance, so they tend to have a frozen-in-amber, history-book quality to them.

The dawn of the social media era, and especially the birth of Twitter in 2006, changed the equation. A critical mass of brief, unrehearsed expressions of shock and mourning add up to a notable death becoming a "trending topic." In fact, one of the recurring jolts of being on Twitter is seeing the name of a famous person you love trending and then instantaneously experiencing a sinking feelingyou just can't click fast enough to find out if they're trending because they died. (Or, alternately, if they did something wonderfulor terrible.)

In the past 24 hours, both Billy Graham and Judy Blame have been trending topics and the subject of mainstream-media obits, and it's been fascinating to see their vastly different lives juxtaposed repeatedly simply because they happened to die within days of each other. (Graham died today and Blame died on Monday, though his passing was only formally announced yesterday.)

Some conservative Twitter Inc. users are accusing the company of unfairly targeting their followers as it steps up efforts to get rid of fake accounts.

Prominent conservative pundits and activists said Wednesday that thousands of their followers had been deleted overnight. Other users said they received messages from Twitter asking them to confirm they were real people before being allowed to keep using the service. The hashtag "TwitterLockOut" was trending in the U.S., meaning thousands of accounts were tweeting about it.

"The twitter purge is real," conservative podcast host Dan Bongino said on Twitter. "Twitter blocked me from twitter ads last night and purged thousands of followers."

Those are just some of the videos on YouTube now sowing disinformation about last week's mass murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

Hogg is one of the Parkland students vocally criticizing the government's inaction on gun violence in the wake of the shooting, which killed 17 of his classmates. He has been sucked into the vortex of internet conspiracies that inevitably seize on these types of events, as happened after the Las Vegas mass shooting in October and the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012.

Dish Network, publicly reporting its Sling TV signups for the first time, said the low-cost alternative to traditional pay TV has attracted 2.2 million customers, marking progress in efforts to slow four years of subscriber losses.

Dish closed out its fourth quarter with an increase of 39,000 pay-TV customers, more than the 30,000 analysts had predicted. Dish had a total of 13.2 million subscribers at the end of 2017, including Sling TV and Dish TV customers, according to a statement Wednesday. That's about the same as the end of the third quarter.

Dish introduced Sling TV three years ago as a $20-a-month alternative for the growing wave of customers who were dumping pay-TV service for lower-priced options like Netflix and Amazon Prime, as well as other live online streaming services like AT&T's DirecTV Now. Dish's struggles in the pay-TV business put more focus on how Chairman Charlie Ergen plans to use a massive trove of airwaves to capitalize on the mobile-video revolution.

The company is also offering to reshuffle about a dozen employees to different roles and will make "smaller changes elsewhere in the company," the memo said.

"In the past 9 years, my group emails have mainly been to celebrate successes," Bankoff wrote in the memo. "Unfortunately, today is one of the toughest days we've had as a company. As a result of our decision to wind down certain initiatives, we'll be saying goodbye to some of our talented colleagues who have made valuable contributions to our success."

Park Pictures, located in New York, Los Angeles and London, is signing director Georgia Hudson for representation in the U.S., U.K. and Netherlands for commercials, branded content and music videos. Hudson has worked on projects for brands such as Under Armour and Dick's Sporting Goods, and videos for artists including Pink, Loyle Carner and Glass Animals. Her Pink music video "What About Us" gained her a nomination for Best Director by the 2017 U.K. MVAs. She's currently directing the short film "Temper," an artistic documentary investigating youth culture and grief, slated for release in 2018.

Eponym. Feel free to Google it. Though not an everyday term, it is the ultimate acknowledgement of cultural acceptance. Eponyms like FedEx, Kleenex, Jacuzzi, Band-Aid, Scotch Tape and Chapstick all continue to lead their respective categories. But others like Formica, Bubble Wrap, Plexiglas, Popsicle, Realtor, Windbreaker, Novocain, Dumpster, Stetson and even Ping Pong have long lost their original corporate association and distinctiveness as a brand.

And then there's Xerox. The Google of its day, Xerox is among the few eponyms that is both noun and verb, having pioneered photocopying and related printing activities. This famous legacy presents an enormous challenge, one that Chief Marketing Officer Toni Clayton-Hine tackled in a story-centric campaign called "Project: Set the Page Free." As you learn in our interview below, Clayton-Hine enlisted 14 noteworthy authors to tell stories, in writing, at events and on videosstories that ultimately helped inspire a broader perspective on what it means to "Xerox something" in 2018.

Welcome to Ad Age's Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital-related news. You can get an audio version of this briefing on your Alexa device. Search for "Ad Age" under "Skills" in the Alexa app.

What people are talking about today

Domino's has finally overtaken Pizza Hut as the biggest pizza chain both in the U.S. and worldwide. Wasting no time, the chain inserted the phrase "the largest pizza company in the world based on global retail sales" into the first sentence of its fourth-quarter earnings release, Ad Age's Jessica Wohl reports. Global retail sales exceeded $12.2 billion in 2017, compared to $12.03 billion for Pizza Hut.

If we really loved risk, we would be scaling mountains, performing stunts or cave diving. Not working in marketing. But often, the way to create real business impact is tied to taking risks. The trick is that this requires marketers to stop associating risk with impending doom and to start viewing it as a gateway to new opportunity. In fact, a willingness to take risks is a marketer's greatest asset right now.

From our experience working with disruptive brands and business models, we've seen the best results when marketers are willing to shed their fearsand even some letters from their titlesand transform from marketers into makers. Not in a Williamsburg Maker Faire manner, but in an agile, high-wire walking, "fail fast and keep going" kind of way.

We know it's easier said than done. But if your ambition is to change minds and models within your organization, and your brand's growth trajectory, we have three tips to help get you there:

As depicted in "Battle of the Sexes," about the legendary rivalry between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, BJK challenges the United States Lawn Tennis Association over its ginormous gender pay gapand founds a breakaway tournament. Its future, at first, is highly unfunded. Saving the day, the group's female manager, puffing away at a news conference, announces a sponsorship deal with Philip Morris' new "libber" cigarette brand, Virginia Slims.

Thus the Virginia Slims Circuit was born. In spite of the obvious contradiction of marrying smokes to championship athletics, it was a genius move. The brand launched in 1968, boasting a rebel spirit in its signature jingle: "You've come a long way, baby, to get where you've got to today." Print and TV ads from Leo Burnett, the agency that created the Marlboro Man, showed a proper, shirtwaisted Victorian wife hiding her tobacco habit from her husband, before cutting to a stylish, animated modern woman. Though Philip Morris was co-opting Gloria Steinem-era feminism, the breakthrough ads seemed more aspirational and fashionable than politicala new, nonthreatening form of liberation. (Liberation lite?)

The brand enjoyed phenomenal growth through the 1990s, until it faced competition from newer brands and younger smokers rejected the old-libber message. The cig was made longer and thinner, and the "long way, baby" line was updated to "It's a Woman Thing."

Domino's Pizza finally has the title it has been hungering for: top pizza seller.

The chain wasted no time crowing about unseating Pizza Hut as the leading pizza chain both in the U.S. and worldwide. Domino's not-so-subtly inserted the phrase "the largest pizza company in the world based on global retail sales" into the very first sentence of today's fourth-quarter earnings release.

Guess Inc. Chairman Paul Marciano is relinquishing his day-to-day duties at the company in the wake of sexual-harassment accusations by model Kate Upton and other women.

The board and Marciano agreed that he should step away from the business without drawing a salaryuntil the completion of an investigation, the apparel seller said on Tuesday. A special board committee with two independent directors is overseeing the matter.

Marciano stepped down as CEO of Guess in 2015, but he has held sway over the company through his roles as co-founder, chairman and chief creative officer. He has denied the allegations, Guess said.

Two small problems with that: First, KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders has been dead since 1980, and he's recently been (kinda) replaced by a series of costumed actors who in all likelihood have zero experience with food-service logistics. Second, talking about a live chicken crossing the road to get away from a KFC conjures an unwelcome mental picture of terrified poultry trying to escape its certain dismemberment and death.

Yesterday, @KFC_UKI doubled down on its (still-living, still-ambulatory) chicken-crossing-the-road joke:

And then just a little while ago, as if to emphasize the exact nature of the fried corpses it presents to customers in bucket-shaped coffins, @KFC_UKI tweeted this:

The weekly Viral Video Chart has shaken off the after-effects of the Super Bowl, with only one campaign from the game remaining in our top 10 most-viewed brand efforts online. (That's the Turkish Airlines ad at No. 2 below.) In the chart a week earlier, populated by data collated by Visible Measures, seven Super Bowlers rook up spots.

The chart counts both views for paid ad placements and so-called "organic" views.

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than seven million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time yesterday.

A few highlights: Nationwide serves up a fresh cut of a spot featuring "American Idol" alum Tori Kelly singing its jingle (Nationwide ads starring Kelly first started airing in early January). Jack Link's, the beef jerky brand, suggests that you rethink your relationship with Sasquatch. And in a Serta ad, a supposed comfort expert named Rick Blomquist has a sudden revelation about the comfort he's been missing out on.

21st Century Fox is sweetening its offer to U.K. regulators reviewing its takeover of Sky, raising the prospect that Walt Disney Co. would guarantee the future of the European broadcaster's news service.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox, which is in negotiations with competition authorities over its 11.7 billion pound ($16.4 billion) purchase of Sky, proposed this week a funding guarantee of at least 10 years for Sky News, the U.K.'s first 24-hour news channel. Disney would inherit that commitment with its $52.4 billion purchase of most of Fox's film and TV assets, including Sky.

The funding proposal is Fox's latest attempt to win approval for a deal that has been held up by additional scrutiny, after allegations of sexual and racial harassment at Fox News in the U.S. and as a 2011 phone-hacking scandal at Murdoch's newspapers continued to dog the billionaire media tycoon.

The Creativity Awards are adding one more new honor this year, the Q Award, created in partnership with sponsor Quantcast.

The Q Award will recognize a team of up to 3 people who challenge the status quo, question everything and strive to break conventional wisdom. The winning team will have discovered new insights and implemented a new strategy, campaign or product that ultimately resulted in increased brand awareness, growth and sales.

This is confusing for a number of reasons. Little Debbie has an adorably, Norman Rockwellian pre-internet face and yet she tweets? Also, Little Debbie is, what, 9 years old and already she's this wise?

It's all a bit too much to process. And judging by many of the responses to Little Debbie's tweet, the Twittersphere seems to agree:

Yum! Brands Inc.'s KFC warned that a supply-chain breakdown that has shut more than half of its 900 U.K. outlets would persist for the rest of the week, continuing to deprive fans of their fried-chicken fix.

KFC said it's working with new logistical partner Deutsche Post AG to solve a problem that began over the weekend, leaving only 430 British shops with any chicken to cook as of Tuesday. About 80 percent of the brand's U.K. eateries are franchised.

"We anticipate the number of closures will reduce today and over the coming days," KFC said in an emailed statement Tuesday. "However, we expect the disruption to some restaurants to continue over the remainder of the week, meaning some will be closed and others operating with a reduced menu or shortened hours."

Antonio Lucio, the CMO of HP, is an industry champion for women and minorities. In this conversation, personal and professional narratives converge as he shares the business imperative driving HP's diversity push, his own missteps and struggle with depression, and the challenge of getting millennials (and their kids) to print. This interview originally ran as an Ad Age "Ad Lib" podcast and has been edited for space and flow.

You have a tendency to last longer that the average CMO.

I like to build things and stay in places. I was 13 years at PepsiCo, eight years at Visa as the CMO. [CMO recruiter] Greg Welsh from Spencer Stuart told me that I was breaking all sorts of records.

Welcome to Ad Age's Wake-Up Call, our daily roundup of advertising, marketing, media and digital-related news. You can get an audio version of this briefing on your Alexa device. Search for "Ad Age" under "Skills" in the Alexa app.

What people are talking about today

If you went off the grid on Presidents Day, the big news from Ad Age is A-List 2018 is out, and Wieden & Kennedy is our Agency of the Year.

Pandora said Tuesday that it will now offer its audio inventory programmatically through popular demand-side platforms such as MediaMath, The Trade Desk and AdsWizz.

Pandora is the last of the three major digital music streaming platforms to offer audio ads through automation, but the company says it brings a significantly larger audience to the table. The move also comes at a time when digital audio is capturing more ad dollars compared to previous years.

Through the first six months of 2017, digital audio grew 42 percent year-over-year to $603 million, and of that, $448 million came from mobile, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau's latest digital ad revenue report.

Sunshine has named Amel Monsur and Will Misselbrook as chief creative officer (New York) and managing director (New York) & SVP, content, respectively. Monsur departs her role as executive creative director at Vice, where she led project and content development. She previously served as the creative director for the late artist Prince and worked on the U.S. launch of the Al Jazeera network. Misselbrook departs his role as head of content and branded entertainment at Cond Nast. Prior to Cond Nast, he served as SVP director of global content development for Coach Inc. Sunshine, founded in London in 2012 by Al MacCuish and Kit Hawkins, has offices in London, New York and Los Angeles and has developed campaigns for clients including BBC Worldwide, AEG Presents, Google, the Roald Dahl Literary Estate, A+E Networks and the Bacardi Group. Former BBH London managing director Mel Exon joined in 2016 in the role of CEO.

Engine-owned content creation and entertainment marketing agency Trailer Park is appointing Zihla Salinas as CEO, and promoting Matt Brubaker to CEO and creative director of the Trailer Park Film Entertainment Division. Salinas joins from Doner L.A., where she was executive vice president and managing director. Previously she held executive positions at the parent company level for MDC Partners. Brubaker has been president of Trailer Park's Film Division for the past decade, working on campaigns for "Dunkirk," "Baby Driver," "Interstellar," "Mad Max," "Suicide Squad," "The Dark Knight Rises," "The Great Gatsby," "Godzilla," and "Ocean's Eleven." Prior to Trailer Park, he was a creative executive at New Line Cinema and at Warner Bros.

Every weekday, we bring you the Ad Age/iSpot Hot Spots, new TV commercials tracked by iSpot.tv, the real-time TV ad measurement company with attention and conversion analytics from more than seven million smart TVs. The ads here ran on national TV for the first time over the weekend.

A few highlights: A woman has a total meltdown over a dent in her car's front bumperuntil she gets an app notification from Esurance within a day of her fender-bender that reads "Your claim has been paid!" NASCAR star Denny Hamlin makes a cameo appearance in a Toyota ad that tells the story of a little boy who dreams of being a race-car driver himself. And in a Winter Olympics-themed ad, eight-time medalist (in short track speed skating) Apolo Ohno wordlessly reveals that he keeps his Hershey's Gold stash in (of course) his personal trophy room.